Now I’ll show you the paid and slightly more technical ways to build your first blog.

NOTE: Below are ways that require a little technical knowledge, if you don’t have that, kindly go to the first post of the series.

WordPress Org Way

1. Research and find a good hosting platform with a cpanel and wordpress quick install(softaculous or similar).
2. Buy a domain name and hosting.
3. Go to cpanel and click Wordpress or Softaculous then Wordpress. Let it install.
4. Once ready visit your wordpress site’s admin panel and start editing or posting right away. You may be required to add ssl yourself but your host will provide you with details.

This guide isn’t in-depth so visit the official guide.

Ghost Way

Tip: Ghost is an awesome platform for bloggers.

Go to the official installation guide: Ghost Install Guide

The JAMstack Way

This blog was built the JAMstack way, no servers, just built using hugo and rendered as html.

To build such,

1. You must first research your framework of choice, there’s Hugo(the best in my opinion), Gatsby(fast page load), Gridsome(same as gatsby), Hexo, Jekyll(slow build times, excellent theme list) and Eleventy(mainly technical)
2. Once the decision is made, i’ll proceed with hugo but the steps are pretty much the same. Find a theme. For example hugo themes.
3. Fork, clone and start editing(i cut out how to clone because i prefer it being in another article for now do your research, you don’t even need to clone to your machine, just work from the fork.
4. Editing should be simple, eg for Hugo, go into the config.toml or .yaml file and change the variables.
5. You can now go to content then posts, copy the structure of example posts and start writing.
6. Alternatively find a theme with a headless cms and start working from there
7. Alternatively again try StackBit, it’s free and you can build a great blog there.

That’s it for today. To learn more about the JAMstack way, go check out this, this and this where i show you exactly how this blog was built.

1. As usual, you have to get into the right mindset, there is no perfect blog, write about what you want to write about. I like tech, finance, self branding, self improvement and lifestyle, so that’s what i write, you don’t have to be extremely knowledgeable in the topic, everyone knows something you don’t and so do you. So write about what you love and want. Value is provided with your heart not your mind.
2. Choose a platform. Many of you have been with me since my WordPress.com days. Btw Thank you! My blog back then wasn’t appealing(though some of you thought it was) and i couldn’t change the appearance all that much because wordpress.com was restrictive in their free service. So you too can start there, right now open a new tab and type wordpress.com, enter. If you are not comfortable with the free wordpress, try the self hosted version(PAID, I’ll talk about this in another post), or wix or substack or weebly or blogger or ghost(PAID, I’ll talk about this later) or deploy your own(little html knowledge required, like mine, I’ll talk about this in another post)
3. Once you find your platform of choice, register and you can now start writing.

Yes, it’s that simple. Next time(part 2), I’ll tell you how you can use the self hosted paid wordpress, ghost and how you also build your own(little html knowledge required + i can build one for you.)